Leading UK and international organisations (including the Stop Aids Campaign, Médecins Sans Frontières, Unicef and Christian Aid) have written to Britain's largest drug company calling on GSK to join a patent pool being put together by Unitaid, which aims to improve access to drugs for HIV/Aids and other diseases in poor countries.

The letter follows an article in the Guardian in which Andrew Witty, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, said that all he knew of Unitaid was what he had read in the papers. Witty had been on a trip to Katine when interviewed by Sarah Boseley.

The patent pool would allow cheap copies and combinations of Aids drugs to be made without legal restraint or delays from the manufacturers, whose monopolies are protected for 20 years – and help save millions of lives in developing countries.

The Washington-based Eisenhower Foundation has held up the Katine project as "one of the most promising new variations on the public journalism theme" and is exploring whether it can be replicated in American inner cities.